Incident Overview
On August 21, 2024, a victim lost $55.43 million in DAI after signing a phishing transaction that compromised their DeFi Saver Proxy, allowing the attacker to drain all the funds.
The exploit began when the victim, using the address 0xf2B88943…e13048, executed a setOwner transaction that inadvertently transferred ownership of their DeFi Saver Proxy contract to a phishing address 0x0000db5c…e70000. This phishing transaction resulted in the victim losing control of their proxy contract. Six hours later, when the victim attempted to execute a transaction, it failed because they were no longer the owner of the proxy.
Subsequently, the attacker changed the ownership of the proxy to 0x5D4b2A02…0459d4, allowing them to drain all the DAI from the compromised contract.
Incident Report
Protocol Information
What the Attacker Needed to Succeed
Understanding the prerequisites for this type of attack helps auditors identify protocols that are most at risk and helps developers build better defenses.
What Auditors Should Check
If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Phishing, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (August 2024).
- Verify all logic paths related to Phishing are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Phishing Attacks attack class for patterns
- Review privileged functions (owner, admin, governance) for potential abuse vectors - centralization risks should be documented and bounded with timelocks or multi-sigs
Master these auditing techniques with hands-on labs and real exploit scenarios in the Smart Contract Hacking course.
Free TrialRelated Attack Classes
The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:
Sources & References
Learn to Prevent the Next Phishing
The Phishing hack is one of many attacks that skilled auditors are trained to detect before deployment. Master real exploit patterns and defense techniques with hands-on Web3 security training.